Why are handhelds often seen as inferior or not as important as home consoles?

[Ganoncrotch]

Norris2k said:

Goodnightmoon said:

That's kind of dumb to say when Metal Gear 3 is on the 3DS and games like Resident Evil Revelation, Kid Icarus Uprising, Street Fighter IV, Kingdom Hearts and Luigi's Mansion 2 look better than nearly every Ps2 game. Look deeper.

I always hate that when someone cut 2 third of an answer and focus on a little mistake to reply only to that.

My point still stand, and is covered in the 2nd part you cut, about being not impressed by games you could already play 20 (here 10) years before. What is the ambition of just adapting MGS 3 10 years later compared to actually making this game from scratch and defining the genre on the PS2  ?

I don't think there is a real issue with a person questioning that portion of your argument considering it undermines the whole thing? Surely you could understand someone pointing out the fact that you start off with, "well it doesn't have games on the scale of X" when it does have an enhanced port of MGS3 with a lot of added features over the PS2 version of the game, the Vita even has a HD collection which has 2 and 3 together on a single Vita card.

You see this is the issue I think a lot of the handheld fans have throughout this whole thread and this whole argument in general is that people look at the 3ds/vita... in so far as they just look at it and think.... naw... that's shite, but for those people who've actually picked it up and been sat up in bed at 2 in the morning battling a giant fucking monster trying to tear a ship apart in Resident Evil revelations or sneaking under cover in MGS... while sneaking under their covers just wishes that the other camp would actually pick up the console and have a play of it, or at the very least... not put it down as though they ever actually did.

As for the age of the port making it less important the 3DS port of Super Street Fighter IV came out just 10 months after the game appeared on the PS/360, it would have been out earlier.... but the 3DS, and porting titles is good for everyone in ways, PC/Xbox/Playstation/WiiU fans later got to enjoy things like Revelations a few years after it had been on the 3DS with a nice port of the game going to all systems, I really doubt it effected how that game felt to play for those enjoying it for the first time on those systems that the game was 2 year old at the time, it was still a perfect great game.

https://youtu.be/HG-dASW5i9s?t=1m45s

That revelations fight... sadly recorded from screen here and I didn't hear the audio so it could be a screaming child playing it, I'm sorry in advance! but yeah look at the size of that and the graphics being thrown out by it and think about its ambition levels (do keep in mind that recorded footage like that doesn't entirely do it justice... but you can still just make out the scale of the fight)

If it was new experiences that you were just after on the handheld scene btw, have you not looked into the Monster Hunter franchise at all? now exclusively on the 3ds with a new game in the series launching just this last month in Monster Hunter Generations which features new monsters and areas as well as a ton of content and worlds from Wii/Wii-U games in the series, those games excel on the handheld because everyone has their own screen to battle with and also you have the second screen to micromanage your weapons and bags while in the middle of a fight with a giant dragon.

I do understand what you mean Norris with Tech moving along and gamers should too... but do keep in mind that there is a lot of older players around now who are really happy to see some of the "retro" type games coming out things like Towerfall Ascension which bring us back to our 1980s arcade glory so we hold those experiences in higher regard at times than a machine flexing its teraflops and showing you just how many billion polygons it can juggle while hopping on one leg :)

 

As for no PC game which wouldn't work on consoles I think you're right in some ways in terms of the core experience but even things like Minecraft (robbing from their wiki)

 - For the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, the PlayStation Vita and Wii U, the world size is limited to 864×864 blocks. Because the outer-most block is unusable on each side of the map, it is effectively 862×862 blocks that can be used. The worlds on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 can be up to 5120x5120

So while the PS4 version is a factor of 6 times bigger in terms of the game world, it still is no where near the scale of worlds you can create on the PC.

Another type of game which suffers badly from the controls and memory available to consoles are MMOs which have never really made the transition from PC to Console and survived, maybe Star Trek Online might change their faiths later this year but I think the PC offers more for those games in terms of just having that many keys available to hotkey to different abilitys or even for communication on the fly with the keyboard. (I know voice coms are handy but when it comes to MMO boss fights you wouldn't want 30 people just shouting about over each other in place of things like raid warnings for everyone flashing on screen in big text)

 

 

I'm not trying to bash consoles here, I'm just stating that there is no one platform which is the go to guy for the "best" experience that if you want to enjoy all that gaming has to offer you need to move from Couch to PC chair to the porcelain Throne and enjoy gaming on each of those platforms :)